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The author, whose books on nature, such as Never Cry Wolf, delighted Canadians for decades, was still active in campaigns to protect his beloved country, recently quoted on CBC’s The Current complaining about a plan to increase wifi service in Canada’s national parks.

“My thoughts can be expressed quite simply. I think it is a disastrous, quite stupid, idiotic concept, and should be eliminated immediately,” he said. “I have very strong feelings that national parks, provincial parks, any kind of parks, that are theoretically set up to provide for the protection of nature, in some form or another, should be respected absolutely and ultimately, and human beings should be kept out of them as much as possible.”

Mowat has never been one to back away from controversy. A 2012 profile of the author of dozens of books — starting with People of the Deer, published in 1952, to his memoirs Otherwise, published in 2008, and Eastern Passagein 2010 — described him as still rising at 6:30 to walk his dog, and begin his writing after breakfasting with his wife of 55 years, Claire.

“By 8 he’s writing, driven by the passion, the hot blood, the rage, and the awe of the wonders of the natural world that have always enlivened Mowat’s adventure yarns,” the late Star journalist Greg Quill wrote.

“Mowat’s books have sold more than 14 million copies in 52 languages and defined the Canadian wilderness for readers all over the world — the landscape, the isolation, the weather, animal and native life — with a heightened sense of reality no other writer has achieved over the past six decades,” Quill wrote after visiting with Mowat at his Port Hope home, only a short distance from where he was born in Belleville.

His wife Claire is also a novelist and memoirist and author of illustrated children’s books. Mowat had two children, David and Sandy.